Marketing of the 21st century

The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) is an important organization in the Marketing domain, committed to close the gap between academia and business in this domain. One of the ways to do that is to identify emerging marketing-related topics and include them in their research agendas. In this line they regularly publish the MSI research priorities for the coming years.

The latest report identifying the MSI the main five research priorities for 2018 -2018 has been the source of inspiration for our students taking part in the elective Master course Advanced Topics in Digital Marketing. The students had to choose a topic within the five research priorities and write an essay based on a critical literature review on the topic in question.

Forty six essays covering a wide range of topics within the MSI research themes were the result of this assignment presenting the state-of-the-art in literature around these topics.

The assignment is in line with our efforts in this course to offer to students the opportunity to get in touch with the most challenging issues of the marketing research and practice as well to present them with possible areas of research in the context of their Master Thesis or even of PhD.

This is also part of our efforts to develop the education around the theme of Digital marketing in The Netherlands to a high stage on national and European level. The vast majority of the topics chosen by the students are related to Digital Marketing indeed.

Although the essays included in the book were not meant to be seen as real scientific research papers three of them have been submitted for journal review and one has been submitted to a conference. At this moment the results of the reviews are not known.

The volume is available in PDF form to everyone interested. Our ambition is to produce a similar volume every year contributing in this way to the debate about the ongoing transformation of the marketing theory and practice in an increasingly digitized marketplace.